The Sense of Semblance:Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art
The Sense of Semblance:Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

Author: Henry W. Pickford

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0823245403

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The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust. The book's principal aim is to move beyond the familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of alternative theories of meaning and understanding from the Anglophone analytic tradition. The book takes as its starting point the claim that Holocaust artworks must fulfill at least two specific yet potentially reciprocally countervailing desiderata: they must meet aesthetic criteria (lest they be, say, merely historical documents) and they must meet historical criteria (they must accurately represent the Holocaust, lest they be merely artworks). I locate this problematic within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy, and claim that Theodor W. Adorno's "dialectic of aesthetic semblance" describes the normative demand that a successful artwork maintain a dynamic tension between these dual desiderata. While working within a framework inspired by Adorno, the book further claims that certain concepts and lines of reasoning from contemporary philosophy best explicate how individual artworks fulfill these dual desiderata, including the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre's theory of the imaginary, work in the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin's theory of dialectical images. Individual chapters provide close readings of lyric poetry by Paul Celan (including a critique of Derridean deconstruction), Holocaust memorials in Berlin, texts by the Austrian quotational artist Heimrad Bäcker, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. The result is a set of interpretations of Holocaust artworks that, in their precision, specificity and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art.

The Sense of Semblance
The Sense of Semblance

Author: Henry W. Pickford

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012-12-31

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 082324542X

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The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust. The book’s principal aim is to move beyond the familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of alternative theories of meaning and understanding from the Anglophone analytic tradition. The book takes as its starting point the claim that Holocaust artworks must fulfill at least two specific yet potentially reciprocally countervailing desiderata: they must meet aesthetic criteria (lest they be, say, merely historical documents) and they must meet historical criteria (they must accurately represent the Holocaust, lest they be merely artworks). I locate this problematic within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy, and claim that Theodor W. Adorno’s “dialectic of aesthetic semblance” describes the normative demand that a successful artwork maintain a dynamic tension between these dual desiderata. While working within a framework inspired by Adorno, the book further claims that certain concepts and lines of reasoning from contemporary philosophy best explicate how individual artworks fulfill these dual desiderata, including the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, work in the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images. Individual chapters provide close readings of lyric poetry by Paul Celan (including a critique of Derridean deconstruction), Holocaust memorials in Berlin, texts by the Austrian quotational artist Heimrad Bäcker, Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. The result is a set of interpretations of Holocaust artworks that, in their precision, specificity and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art.

Sense and Semblance
Sense and Semblance

Author: Remington Norman

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13:

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Who will buy this book? Anyone with concerns about modern society. While innovation and intellectual achievement continue to transform societies, the concomitant increase in personal prosperity has nurtured a superficial mindset where value equates to what is immediately appealing, mediocrity passes for excellence, and spin displaces serious debate. .Sense and Semblance presents a powerful indictment of superficiality. It confronts the core issues and reinforces the need to challenge this cosmetic culture in both public and private life.

Semblance and Event
Semblance and Event

Author: Brian Massumi

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0262297256

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An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.” Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented—variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention—which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.

Culture/Contexture
Culture/Contexture

Author: E. Valentine Daniel

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0520323696

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The rapprochement of anthropology and literary studies, begun nearly fifteen years ago by such pioneering scholars as Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and James Clifford, has led not only to the creation of the new scholarly domain of cultural studies but to the deepening and widening of both original fields. Literary critics have learned to "anthropologize" their studies—to ask questions about the construction of meanings under historical conditions and reflect on cultural "situatedness." Anthropologists have discovered narratives other than the master narratives of disciplinary social science that need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies. Culture/Contexture brings together for the first time literature and anthropology scholars to reflect on the antidisciplinary urge that has made the creative borrowing between their two fields both possible and necessary. Critically expanding on such pathbreaking works as James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture and Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, contributors explore the fascination that draws the disciplines together and the fears that keep them apart. Their topics demonstrate the rich intersection of anthropology and literary studies, ranging from reading and race to writing and representation, incest and violence, and travel and time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

The Sense of Brown
The Sense of Brown

Author: José Esteban Muñoz

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-08-24

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1478012560

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The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Essays
Essays

Author: Friedrich Schiller

Publisher: Continuum

Published: 1993-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13:

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Phenomenology and the Making of the World
Phenomenology and the Making of the World

Author: Dag Hedin

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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This study deals with the role of phenomenology in explaining the making of the world, in particular with regard to religion. It is shown that in dealing with people's responses to life, the world and what is regarded to be beyond the known world means recognizing the restrictions provided by language and knowledge. It is also shown how this creates difficulties as to the claim within religion to express what is beyond the known and not directly available by means of ordinary language.

The Semblance of Identity
The Semblance of Identity

Author: Christopher Lee

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-04-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0804783705

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The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization. This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.